Read/Write permission for "SMB" vs. "File Access"?

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slavrenz wrote:

I'm unclear about the difference between read/write permission for "SMB" vs. for "File Access". I have a share that I connect to via SMB, and to which I want to add new files. I thought adding read/write permission for the "SMB" protocol would solve this, but it turns out I had to enable read/write permission under "File Access" instead.

 

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Actually you needed to enable read/write permission under "File Access" as well.

File permissions (as you might expect from the name) are applied to the files and folders themselves.  They aren't related to the network access - there are plenty of files in a Windows PC that you can't access or delete unless you use administrative access.

SMB permissions are specific to SMB network access (e.g, the network share), and they are independent from the file permissions.

The NAS (like Windows) intersects these two sets of permissions - taking the most restrictive interpretation.  So if either one is read-only, then you get read-only access.  If either one denies access, then access is denied.

In general, the easiest way to control access to a share is to set the File Access to allow full access by everyone, and then to manage access using SMB alone.  One reason for that - Windows will let users change the file access (by right-clicking the file and changing the properties), but users can't change the SMB access. Another is that different files will generally have different owners, and that can make managing access by file permissions burdensome.